I can honestly say that there is no greater joy in life than when I'm immersed in a damn fine book, be it Kafka, Kinky Friedman or a bit of Enid Blyton. So, quite why I've read less than a hundred novels in my lifetime is maybe a question that will remain unanswered, unless you know me personally, in which case you'll roll your eyes and yell "It's because you're a lazy twat with the attention span of a mayfly!!"
Jim Bliss over at The Quiet Road has a meme for us. It consists of taking the results of the BBC's 'Big Read' poll and marking off what you've read, what you intend to read, what you have no intention of reading and what you utterly despised. Big problem for me is that I've only read about ten of the fuckers, which is slightly less than twice what the poll compilers thought 'The Average Person' would have read. Nonetheless, it's a somewhat embarrassing figure, even for a troglodyte like me. I suppose I could bump it up to 15 if I were to include the books listed that I've started and not finished............................
I shan't re-print the list, it would be too depressing, but what I will do is provide a list of novels that weren't in the list. but ruddy well ought to have been.
A Clockwork Orange by
Anthony Burgess: Nadsat. That's all you need to know. That and some murder, mayhem, fantastic pacing, and two different endings, depending on what side of the Atlantic you lived on. The Brits got the upbeat 'man comes good with age and experience' ending, the Yanks got the 'Humanity is vile' ending. Cool!
The Scene by Clarence Cooper Jr: A gruelling merry-go-round of drug addicts, pimps, whores, cops and low-life's. That sounds like a put down but it's not. Quite the opposite actually. Cooper's writing is the key, grimly vivid, it grabs you by the fucking nuts and doesn't let go, slinging you from character to character without mercy. Some would argue that it's 'mere pulp'. I would argue that they are wankers. If you see it, buy it. At worst, you'll quite enjoy it.
The Castle by Franz Kafka: The logic defying world concocted by Kafka in The Castle will always remain with me. Every time I wake up from a bizarre dream or encounter bureaucratic insanity, the frustrations and trials (no pun intended) of 'K' always seem to come to mind. A lone Land Surveyor arrives in a remote village to find that he's wanted neither at the administrative centre (The Castle) nor in the village itself. He desperately hooks up with a barmaid and ends up as a brow-beaten school caretaker. It matters not, for he will seemingly stop at nothing to gain access to the impenetrable castle. A little tragi-comic relief comes in the shape of his appointed assistants who resemble a sort of retarded Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. Frustratingly, they seem to have more contact with the Castle than he does.
It's as dense as hell and the humour is pitch black.
No more so than at the bottom of the last page............ ;)
Three more tomorrow night.........
.......................and you wasted every day (B. Janowitz)
Get the covers on and all into the pavillion for tea and cake! Looks like it's going to chuck it down for the rest of the month. I simply can't wait until Autumn, when we can finally stop pretending to be appalled by the shitty weather, acting as if we've been short-changed by what the elements throw at us.
You'll all be glad to know that I've decided to spare you my book reviews. They're as tedious to write as they must be to read. To this end, the final eight 'books that should have been in the BBC Big Read, but weren't' are;
6 - Ham On Rye by Charles Bukowski
7 - Focaults Pendulum by Umberto Eco
8 - Q by Luther Blissett
9 - The Gospel Singer by Harry Crews
10 - The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
11 - Death and The Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
12 - The Quiet American by Graham Greene
13 - Death In The Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
Sorry, nothing hugely exciting in there. Some of them are utterly inspirational, books that I have become obsessed with. Others are what I'd simply term as 'darn good reads'.
Songs Of Summer No10: Avenue - St Etienne
